To reduce the performance penalty incurred by seeking a drive head, operating system software (and drive firmware) traditionally reorder I/O packets to minimize seek time. Much research has been done to address long seek times while still maintaining fair access to the disk drive. Traditional disk scheduling algorithms generally reorder requests destined for a disk to maximize data throughput. One common algorithm implemented by many operating systems is the C-LOOK algorithm, often incorrectly referred to as the C-SCAN algorithm. The C-LOOK algorithm reorders any number of requests to achieve the highest throughput to a device that can be attained. However, in this type reordering, the C-LOOK algorithm can introduce large latencies between the time a request is begun and when the request is eventually completed.
As noted above, the most common algorithm that is implemented is the C-LOOK algorithm which orders requests in order that the disk head sweeps in one direction across the disk performing Input/Output operations (I/Os), then returns to the other side of the disk to perform additional I/Os. This is often referred to as logical block address ordering or LBA ordering. Unfortunately, traditional disk scheduling algorithms trade-off higher throughput to the disk, for longer access times (or latencies), over simple first-in-first-out (FIFO) queuing. This provides better throughput, but at the cost of potentially and dramatically higher latencies for I/O requests. For traditional operating systems, this trade-off is well worth the cost. For newer systems that need to support audio-visual streaming applications, in one example, merely trading latency for throughput is often not acceptable.
Many alternative disk-scheduling algorithms have been implemented. In particular, the first-come-first-serve (FCFS, also sometimes referred to as FIFO) algorithm and earliest-deadline-first (EDF) algorithms have been proposed respectively for scheduling in multimedia applications. The FCFS algorithm bounds the time to perform an I/O as a function of the current queue length and the EDF algorithm guarantees that requests with earlier deadlines will be executed before requests with later deadlines.
Unfortunately, both the FCFS and EDF algorithms suffer from poor I/O throughput. On special purpose and real-time operating systems, this poor utilization of the disk may not be a drawback, but on general purpose operating systems that also host multimedia applications, for example, significantly decreasing throughput to bound the latency to perform I/O requests is generally unacceptable.